It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and encourages.
There is an enormous difference between the people "consulting with colleagues" and the people openly cheating. When I was doing my engineering degree there were always groups of students who would go over assignments together, see if their answers matched up, and then look through the textbooks and course materials together to see which person was right. That's consulting.
There were also people who would pay someone else to do the assignments, and then upload PDFs of completed assignments to a private chat. World of difference.
Sure, but what the other person is describing as cheating sounds, to me at least, very much like the former case. There was a task, the students were allowed to work on the task in their own time, with their own resources, and chose to put their heads together rather than work on them individually. To me, that seems fairly reasonable.
That said, a lot of this stuff seems kind of culturally specific. At least for the two degrees that I experienced in the UK, there were roughly three types of graded work: exams (overseen, sit in silence, possibly with your own notes but generally not, fixed time limit around 1-2hrs); lab-work (usually done in the building although worked on outside of lab hours as well, fixed deadline of around a week or two, usually graded at least in part based on an oral conversation with the examiner); and coursework (take-home work, fixed deadline ranging from one week to a couple of months, allowed to discuss but direct copying is banned).
In these cases, it rarely makes sense to cheat by directly sharing answers. Obviously in an exam it would be useful, but the conditions of the exam make it largely prohibitively difficult. In coursework, it's usually obvious if people are handing copies of the same work in. And for lab work, the challenge was usually not to just complete the lab and get a "right" result, but rather to understand the task and be able to explain what was going on to the TA grading you. If you can cheat well enough to pass that, you probably understand what's going on - which is exactly the aim of the course anyway.
Whereas it feels like what people are talking about here is students being sent home with problem worksheets, being expected not to talk about them at all, and then getting grades based on those answers. That seems to me to be a system that practically encourages cheating - work together as a group, and you'll obviously be able to achieve more than any one individual, even if you could all pass the course in the first place. In contrast, we also had similar worksheets, but they were never graded, and we were usually encouraged to work together to figure out what was going on. We could then take our answers to tutorials and have a discussion about where we went wrong and why we went wrong usually in a group of any four or five.
So reading this article and some of the comments here, I'm really struggling to get an image of what these teachers are expecting from their students, if they're setting problems that are so obviously gameable.
In theory the purpose of the university is to help you develop skills independently, so that you can bring something to the table when you do consult with colleagues in the workplace.
That's basically the point of university isn't it? It assumes that not everyone can be qualified to do everything and imposes restrictions on who can be hired based on their known qualifications.
I'd rather say that the equivalent of what the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" is more a "study session" than an exam (be it take-home).
This is when you learn things, and everyone brings something to the table.
I'd say the equivalent of an exam is a job interview. When the other party wants to see what the individual knows.
Come on. In one case, you aim to prove that you have mastered an established body of knowledge. In the other case, you are trying to solve an open problem with any legitimate means available. Those are entirely different things, and conflating them is obtuse.
Except if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired. You are not allowed to "consult" with anyone, so why should you be allowed to consult with anyone about your homework.
> Except if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired
What the hell are you talking about? I routinely consult with others and others routinely consult with me. That's afaik standard practice in most professions: engineering, medicine, architecture, psychology, marketing, and yes software development.
You share confidential information with colleagues outside your job? I guess how much or what consulting you can do depends a lot on your job. I know quite a few companies which don't allow talking about specific problems you are facing because that would reveal information they consider confidential. Now if we are talking general questions, sure but you are very much allowed to do the same as a student. All this to show that sharing information/solutions has quite a gradient even in professional life.
Again: what the hell are you talking about? We were talking about professional consulting, not about sharing confidential information. These are two very different activities, and you can definitely do one without the other.
The statement saying "if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired" is false.
We are replying to a post which said cheating in education is what is consultation in professional life. Nowhere did we talk about general "consultation" we comparing copying others solutions (cheating) to "consultation", I would argue that the equivalent of copying someone's specific solution in many (most) cases would be a violation of ethical/company/workplace rules and is not just "consultation".
Asking someone for help with homework (much more equivalent to general consultation) is not generally considered cheating in education either.
Absolutely, the equivalent of cheating is 'not just "consultation"', but in your original message you said "if you consult..." without qualification. And no, you don't get fired for "consulting" alone. Right below you already changed your statement to "they are rules in professional life about how you consult with others". Let's maybe leave it at that? This doesn't seem like a productive discussion and is entering flamewar territory.
I assumed it was clear from the parent I was replying to (like others did), that I meant my statement in the context of how they said it's equivalent to what's called cheating not a general statement about all consultation, but you're right I should have made that more clear.
You are also correct that this is not a productive discussion, because we are discussing a misunderstanding (due to me not being clear enough).
I did find your language and reaction a bit disproportionate though.
I don't think so, grandparent was definitely talking about general consultation, and on your second post you clearly say you mean that all but the most generic kind of consultation is a fireable offence. But happy that we got to a common ground.
We are all replying to a post that said what is considered cheating in education is simply consultation in professional life. I responded that they are rules in professional life about how you consult with others. In other words there are rules about consultation in both education (there is usually no issue about studying together, but there are issues about just copying somebody else's homework) and professional life (e.g. a doctor can't just share a specific medical file with anyone asking for a solution, or an engineer can't ask someone at a different company to program some program for him).
> I responded that they are rules in professional life about how you consult with others.
No you didn't, you said "if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired", which is clearly false. I'm the one who said rules should be followed. But I'm happy that the mistake was corrected and we're now on the same page.
